My father liked to read me poems he’d written about women who rejected him. Of a sonnet dedicated to my kindergarten best friend’s mom he said, this is as good as anything Yeats ever wrote. All women born are so perverse no man need boast their love possessing. That line from Triolet by Robert Bridges was his favorite. His fingertips are cigarette butts and the yellowed pages of old books, they spooned me fish oil, regulated my diet, encompassed my ribs. Sometimes he read fun things too: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings. He spent hours helping me practice for my voice lessons, teaching me to keep time like a metronome, one and two and three and. There is a mole on his shoulder. The skin of his back soft, clean. There is a crest of thin dark hair on his chest, circling his nipples, burst blood vessel on his rib cage like a bite. I smell the oil of his scalp, see him with spray bottle dividing thin silk strands into a precise part. His breath rattles against my nape still, men wrap their limbs around me and my skin burns, gut turns to bile. There is a rhubarb-colored comforter with a tulip pattern. The pads of his thumbs. I tell myself I’m summoning phantoms, clench my jaw and ignore the shredding in my sternum until I forget to have a body. I can only breathe when big spoon with my lovers though I cum most when made match-box small. My father’s tenderness is more painful to dredge up than his rage.

Phoebe Rusch is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Michigan, where they were a Zell fellow and received Hopwood awards in screenwriting and non-fiction. Their essays also appear on the World Policy Journal blog, The Mighty, Bust magazine and in Luna Luna. They blog at https://phoebecrusch.wordpress.com/